“I could have saved you, but you left me”
Served as a rebel in eastern Ukraine since 2014
Russia deploys female snipers since World War II
A Russian female sniper known to have killed a total of 40 Ukrainians, including civilians, has been captured by Ukrainian forces, news broke.
According to foreign media such as the British Daily Mail and Mirror on the 28th (local time), the Ukrainian military announced on the official social media (SNS) on the 26th that they had captured Irina Starikova (41, codename: Baghira), a Russian sniper from Serbia, Baghira. published a photo of
“I think the Russians wanted me to die,” Bagheira said at the time of the capture.
Baghira has been serving as a rebel alongside separatists in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine since 2014. Since then, he has been put on the wanted list of Ukraine, killing dozens of soldiers and civilians.
Baghira has two daughters, ages 9 and 11, and her husband, who is remarried, is a Belarusian soldier who is said to be fighting for the pro-Russian separatist militants.
George Levishvili, a war studies researcher at King’s College London, UK, said: “Ukrainian forces have captured a notorious sniper known as ‘Baghira’. He is charged with the killing of 40 Ukrainians, including civilians.” The Sun reported that
Russia is famous for deploying female snipers even during World War II. In particular, a woman named Ludmila Pavlichenko at that time was nicknamed ‘The Lady of the Dead’ by killing 309 people.
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote a 1985 book, The Unwomanly Face of War, that documented the activities of female snipers in Russia in the past.
